When consumers are lured into debt with offers to buy that shirt in four easy payments, that’s financialization at work. When you can’t keep track of all the subscription services needed to follow your favorite N.B.A. team, that’s financialization, too. When you’re no longer allowed to record your own child’s hockey game because an investment group bought the rink, that’s financialization.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
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America rests on a foundation of ordered liberty. The state sets broad rules that are intended to be timeless and universal, and implements those rules. We have not always done that perfectly, but the idea was that we were always getting better.
~ Dean Ball via The Atlantic
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Vietnam was worse than immoral — it was a mistake.
~ Dean Acheson
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Bounded rationality means that people make quite reasonable decisions based on the information they have. But they don’t have perfect information, especially about more distant parts of the system.
~ Donella Meadows
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‘Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure’ would seem to have been almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos.
~ David Foster Wallace
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The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.
~ Cormac McCarthy
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Today, we tend to think of economic and racial egalitarianism as closely yoked causes. One hundred years ago, this was far from the case. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of those Americans most skeptical of corporate power were also the most hostile to racial equality, while those Americans who most adamantly rejected economic reform hoped to mobilize racial minorities as allies.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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Via Don’t Trust the Rankings That Put China’s Universities on Top published by The New York Times on February 11, 2026
The gap between the rankings and reality can be explained by Goodhart’s law, which says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It’s like trying to cure a fever by icing the thermometer: You’ve cooled the instrument, but the patient is still burning up.
~ Ariel Procaccia
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Only entropy comes easy.
~ Anton Chekhov
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Our waking life’s desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
~ Cormac McCarthy
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